Increasingly, information is stored and accessed via remote computing devices. Local computing devices, such as a client device, can be used to access and interact with remote computing devices to retrieve information such as the documents, videos, images, applications, and others. These remote computing devices may also interact with local computing devices to deploy applications coded on the local computing devices into clusters of remote computing devices, such as a distributed computing environment, commonly referred to as “a cloud” or “the cloud.”
Some of the information that is remotely accessed is information that is sensitive in some regard. For example, the information may include sensitive personal or financial information or may include information protected by copyright or other legal structures. Authorizing one set of users to access one set of information while denying access to another set or other sets of information is an area in which substantial progress has been made over the years.
However, the increasing reliance and utilization of distributed computing environments has complicated the provisioning of access to information, resources, and functions to those entities that should be authorized to access that information, those resources, and those functions. Accordingly, current approaches to providing access permissions within distributed computing environments have not been entirely satisfactory.
These drawings will be better understood by those of ordinary skill in the art by reference to the following detailed description.